US intelligence officials have withheld sensitive intelligence from President Donald Trump because they are concerned it could be leaked or compromised, according to current and former officials familiar with the matter.

The officials’ decision to keep information from Mr. Trump underscores the deep mistrust that has developed between the intelligence community and the president over his team’s contacts with the Russian government, as well as the enmity he has shown toward US spy agencies.

On Wednesday, Mr Trump accused the agencies of leaking information to undermine him.

In some of these cases of withheld information, officials have decided not to show Mr Trump the sources and methods that the intelligence agencies use to collect information, the current and former officials said. Those sources and methods could include, for instance, the means that an agency uses to spy on a foreign government.

A White House official said: “There is nothing that leads us to believe that this is an accurate account of what is actually happening.”

Intelligence officials have in the past not told a president or members of Congress about the ins and outs of how they ply their trade. At times, they have decided that secrecy is essential for protecting a source, and that all a president needs to know is what that source revealed and what the intelligence community thinks is important about it.

But in these previous cases in which information was withheld, the decision wasn’t motivated by a concern about a president’s trustworthiness or discretion, the current and former officials said.

It wasn’t clear Wednesday how many times officials have held back information from Mr Trump.

The officials emphasised that they know of no instance in which crucial information about security threats or potential plotting has been omitted. Still, the misgivings that have emerged among intelligence officials point to the fissures spreading between the White House and the US spy agencies.

Mr Trump, a Republican, asked on Monday night for the resignation of Mike Flynn, his national security adviser, after the White House said the president lost trust in him, in part, because he misstated the nature of his conversations with the Russian ambassador.

Last night, Mr Trump castigated the intelligence agencies and the news media, blaming them for Mr Flynn’s downfall.

“The real scandal here is that classified information is illegally given out by ‘intelligence’ like candy. Very un-American!” Mr Trump tweeted.

Mr Trump doesn’t immerse himself in intelligence information, and it isn’t clear that he has expressed a desire to know sources and methods. The intelligence agencies have been told to dramatically pare down the president’s daily intelligence briefing, both the number of topics and how much information is described under each topic, an official said. Compared with his immediate predecessors, Mr Trump so far has chosen to rely less on the daily briefing than they did.

The current and former officials said the decision to avoid revealing sources and methods with Mr Trump stems in large part from the president’s repeated expressions of admiration for Russian President Vladimir Putin and his call, during the presidential campaign for Russia to continue hacking the emails of his Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton.

US intelligence agencies have concluded that Russia stole and leaked emails from Mrs. Clinton’s campaign to undermine the election process and try to boost Mr Trump’s chances of winning, an allegation denied by Russian officials.

Several of Mr Trump’s current and former advisers are under investigation for the nature of their ties to Moscow, according to people familiar with the matter. After Mr Flynn’s dismissal, politicians have called on the government to release the transcripts of his conversations with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak and to disclose whether Mr Trump was aware of or directed Mr Flynn’s conversations.

Rep. Adam Schiff (D., Calif.), the ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, said he has heard concerns from officials about sharing especially sensitive information with Mr Trump.

“I’ve talked with people in the intelligence community that do have concerns about the White House, about the president, and I think those concerns take a number of forms,” Mr Schiff said, without confirming any specific incidents. “What the intelligence community considers their most sacred obligation is to protect the very best intelligence and to protect the people that are producing it.”

“I’m sure there are people in the community who feel they don’t know where he’s coming from on Russia,” Mr Schiff said.

Tensions between the spy agencies and Mr Trump were pronounced even before he took office, after he publicly accused the Central Intelligence Agency and others of leaking information about alleged Russian hacking operations to undermine the legitimacy of his election win. In a meandering speech in front of a revered CIA memorial the day after his inauguration, Mr Trump boasted about the size of his inaugural crowd and accused the media of inventing a conflict between him and the agencies.

In a news conference today with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, Mr Trump again lashed out at the media and intelligence officials, whom he accused of “criminal” leaks about Mr Flynn’s conversations with the Russian ambassador last December.

Mr Trump didn’t explain Wednesday why he asked for Mr Flynn’s resignation. Instead, he suggested the leaks and the media were to blame for his ouster.

“General Flynn is a wonderful man. I think he’s been treated very, very unfairly by the media,” Mr Trump said. “And I think it’s really a sad thing that he was treated so badly.”

“I think in addition to that from intelligence, papers are being leaked, things are being leaked,” Mr Trump said. “It’s criminal action. It’s a criminal act and it’s been going on for a long time before me but now it’s really going on.”

Reviving his line of criticism against intelligence officials during the transition, Mr Trump said the “illegally leaked” information was from people with political motivations. “People are trying to cover up for a terrible loss that the Democrats had under Hillary Clinton,” Mr Trump said.

A person close to Mr Trump said he was reluctant to let go of Mr Flynn because Mr Flynn had vigorously supported him at a stage of his presidential campaign when few people did. Mr Trump also felt Mr Flynn did nothing wrong in his conversations with the US ambassador to Russia and had good intentions.

“They both continue to support each other,” this person said.

For intelligence veterans, who had hoped that Mr Trump’s feud with the agencies might have subsided, Wednesday’s comments renewed and deepened concerns.

“This is not about who won the election. This is about concerns about institutional integrity,” said Mark Lowenthal, a former senior intelligence official.

“It’s probably unprecedented to have this difficult a relationship between a president and the intelligence agencies,” Mr Lowenthal said. “I can’t recall ever seeing this level of friction. And it’s just not good for the country.”

Several congressional probes are examining Russia’s alleged meddling in the election. On Wednesday, the Republican and Democratic leaders of the Senate Judiciary Committee requested a Justice Department briefing and documents related to Mr Flynn’s resignation, including details of his communications with Russian officials.

Carol E Lee and Damian Paletta contributed to this article

And then, yes, as the story indicates, understand that these leftist unionized spooks who literally illegally leaked the phone intercepts of an American citizen are now literally saying that the fact that traitorous leftwing whackjobs leaking classified information is proof that traitorous leftwing whackjobs should be even more traitorous by withholding information from the President of the United States.

When the only reason these turds have jobs in the first damn place is to provide information to the President of the United States.

“We can’t give the President of the United States information because there are leaks. And we won’t mention the fact that we’re the same people who are doing all the leaking as an act of sabotage against our Constitution and our republic and our democratically elected president.

I’ve been talking about the evils of what they call “public sector unions” for years now.

Liberal progressives don’t give a damn about the whole people. They have split America apart one racial group at another’s throats, one income level at another’s throats, and privileged union employees at the throats of fed-up taxpayers. Unions have been feeding off taxpayers – who get a fraction of the wages and benefits the privileged union pigs get – for decades. Government employees earn TWICE the wages and benefits of their counterparts in the private sector. But Democrats don’t care: they view the private sector and everyone who works in it as evil cash cows who are to be exploited and impoverished.”

Government workers don’t contribute to the tax rolls; they FEED OFF the tax roles. We pay our taxes so an elite class of bureaucrats can have TWICE the wages and benefits that we get for doing the exact same jobs. And then our tax dollars go to fund the Democrat Party so they can pass an un-American agenda. Big labor money is TEN TIMES anything conservatives have in special interests. And again, the most disgusting thing of all is that it’s our own damn money that is being used to attack the private sector workers who paid it in taxes.

One of the problems with unions is that the quickly become just another vehicle to take advantage of workers. They have three priorities: 1) the top brass of the union; 2) political ideology; 3) the workers who have seniority in the system. They don’t care about creating more jobs. And a lot of the time, unions when threatened will vote in Nazi goose step to hold on to their pay and benefits for the seniority class even though it decimates the bottom half of the union. Even if it means giving up just a few bucks to save hundreds of jobs.

These union thugs are out of control; and they are out of control for the Democratic Party and for leftist causes.

And we can see the power of a bureaucracy when that bureaucracy decides it has and should have more power than the President of the United States elected by the American people.

Every single one of the “spies” playing these Stalinist games against our president are dedicated members of government unions.

FDR pointed out that government unions are fundamentally treasonous because you have workers organizing against what or who? The American people!!! THAT’S who pays them. FDR said:

The employer is the whole people, who speak by means of laws enacted by their representatives in Congress.

And FDR then went on to say:

Particularly, I want to emphasize my conviction that militant tactics have no place in the functions of any organization of Government employees. Upon employees in the Federal service rests the obligation to serve the whole people, whose interests and welfare require orderliness and continuity in the conduct of Government activities. This obligation is paramount. Since their own services have to do with the functioning of the Government, a strike of public employees manifests nothing less than an intent on their part to prevent or obstruct the operations of Government until their demands are satisfied. Such action, looking toward the paralysis of Government by those who have sworn to support it, is unthinkable and intolerable.

And what do you call this crap if it isn’t “militant tactics”??? This is now TREASON against the United States and against the American people.

What would FDR have done if he had learned as he was facing World War II that Republicans in the intelligence community were withholding vital information from him out of political bias??? What would have been the appropriate thing to have done to those people.

Government bureaucracies are without any question a form a monopoly. Liberals want to break up every single potential monopoly in the private sector because of the clear risks a monopoly can pose once it gets that kind of power. But let me ask a question: how ELSE can you get your drivers license but through the DMV, as one example? Where ELSE can a president get his intelligence but from the unionized government intelligence services? It’s a monopoly. Either make the monopoly work for all the people by totally and permanently removing all politics from hem or kill the damn things and kill them by the harshest means possible.

If government workers organize and collectivize themselves, there is inherent abuse of power. That was what even FDR believed.

These illegitimate and un-American government unions must be destroyed. And they must be destroyed NOW.

At this point, if there is a terrorist attack on the United States, Donald Trump will be right to point a finger at the Democrats in the intelligence establishment, point at the fact that they are on the record withholding information from him, and initiate a witch hunt by which every single intelligence official who has expressed a leftwing political viewpoint find himself or herself on Gitmo.

I remember back when Mitt Romney said that Russia was America’s greatest geopolitical threat and Obama mocked him and said the 1980s wants its foreign policy back. Do you remember that? Do you remember where all of the union “intelligence bureaucracy” was on that subject back then? Were they calling Obama out for the pathetic fool he was? These “intelligence professionals” who weren’t able to understand there is something called radical Islam and that this religious movement is responsible for like 99.99 percent of all terrorist attacks? They were quiet as mice. But now all of a sudden, Russia IS our greatest geopolitical threat, after all, responsible for everything bad and awful. Trump very clearly wants to harness the world against the radical, violent Islam that is undermining stability across the planet and do with Putin what FDR did with Stalin and work to end a greater evil. But lo and behold the same fool leftists that have always been wrong are still wrong.

And the unionized bureaucracy in the “intelligence establishment” started screaming as their monopoly was threatened. How DARE Donald Trump not believe whatever the hell these fools told him??? And they broke the law with criminal conduct that guarantees a minimum of a fifteen-year prison term to get rid of Gen. Flynn.

I think I’m on to something here. I hope Trump’s team is on it, too.

At this point, the Democrats are very clearly a Nazi Fifth Column doing their utmost to destabilize and destroy the Republic of the United States. The Democrat Party is a clear and present danger.

I say rehire Gen. Flynn and then FIRE every single other member of the intelligence community. Just for starters.

I’m also going to express my hope that if these fascist shenanigans don’t end, the next Democratic president ought to face the very same treatment from any one who doesn’t like what he or she is doing. This is going to guarantee the collapse of the United States and just remember that Democrats started this circular firing squad.

Selfish Sanitation Department bosses from the snow-slammed outer boroughs ordered their drivers to snarl the blizzard cleanup to protest budget cuts — a disastrous move that turned streets into a minefield for emergency-services vehicles, The Post has learned.

Miles of roads stretching from as north as Whitestone, Queens, to the south shore of Staten Island still remained treacherously unplowed last night because of the shameless job action, several sources and a city lawmaker said, which was over a raft of demotions, attrition and budget cuts.

“They sent a message to the rest of the city that these particular labor issues are more important,” said City Councilman Dan Halloran (R-Queens), who was visited yesterday by a group of guilt-ridden sanitation workers who confessed the shameless plot.

Halloran said he met with three plow workers from the Sanitation Department — and two Department of Transportation supervisors who were on loan — at his office after he was flooded with irate calls from constituents.

The snitches “didn’t want to be identified because they were afraid of retaliation,” Halloran said. “They were told [by supervisors] to take off routes [and] not do the plowing of some of the major arteries in a timely manner. They were told to make the mayor pay for the layoffs, the reductions in rank for the supervisors, shrinking the rolls of the rank-and-file.”

New York’s Strongest used a variety of tactics to drag out the plowing process — and pad overtime checks — which included keeping plows slightly higher than the roadways and skipping over streets along their routes, the sources said.

The snow-removal snitches said they were told to keep their plows off most streets and to wait for orders before attacking the accumulating piles of snow.

They said crews normally would have been more aggressive in combating a fierce, fast-moving blizzard like the one that barreled in on Sunday and blew out the next morning.

The workers said the work slowdown was the result of growing hostility between the mayor and the workers responsible for clearing the snow.

In the last two years, the agency’s workforce has been slashed by 400 trash haulers and supervisors — down from 6,300 — because of the city’s budget crisis. And, effective tomorrow, 100 department supervisors are to be demoted and their salaries slashed as an added cost-saving move.

[Snip]

Bloomberg spokesman Stu Loeser said only: “We would hope this is not the case.”

But multiple Sanitation Department sources told The Post yesterday that angry plow drivers have only been clearing streets assigned to them even if that means they have to drive through snowed-in roads with their plows raised.

And they are keeping their plow blades unusually high, making it necessary for them to have to run extra passes, adding time and extra pay.

One mechanic said some drivers are purposely smashing plows and salt spreaders to further stall the cleanup effort.

“That is a disgrace. I had to walk three miles because the buses can’t move,” said salesman Yuri Vesslin, 38, of Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn.

Now, when I point out the fact that labor unions are fundamentally un-American, I’m not making anything up.

From my aforementioned article about labor unions being genuinely evil:

Let’s also point out that while labor unions were being violent racists in America, they were in the process of being the source of the greatest evil in human history in Europe. It was the labor unions that formed the core of Lenin’s violent communist movement. The Marxists started out in 1898 by forming the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party. Just as labor unions formed the core of Hitler’s National Socialist German WORKERS Party.

“A Socialist Workers’ Government has achieved a workers revolution in Germany without resorting to, though in some respects it approximates, Communism. Adolf Hitler has done it by wiping out all class privileges and class distinction, but the economics foundation of property rights and private capital has been left almost intact – for the present time.”

“The Third Reich, under Hitler, has wiped out corporate trade-unionism by forcing all workers to join one great government union, the National Socialist Union of Employers and Workers…”

While American labor unions were basking in the light of FDR’s pork barrel political favoritism and doing everything they could to keep poor blacks down, their European counterparts were at work preparing to set the world on fire.

“…we need to fundamentally restructure our economy and re-establish popular control over the private corporations which have distorted our economy and hijacked our government. That’s a long-term job, but one we should start now.

I Hate the Media points out the scary parallels to the ugly history of the past:

“Re-establish”? Wouldn’t that imply that there had once been popular control over private corporations?

Richard. Mr. Trumka. Sir. Pardon our impertinence, but we believe that what you’re talking about here is National Socialism.

As in Adolf Trumka.

Meanwhile, while AFL-CIO head Trumka was flirting with National Socialism, recently retired SEIU president Andy Stern was kissing up to socialism’s more famous sister, communism, saying:

“Workers of the world unite – it’s not just a slogan anymore. It’s the way we’re gonna have to do our work.”

Ah, yes, the vile, vindictive, vicious and vehemently anti-American Marxists. And labor unions, which are nothing more than the Communist Party in America today.

Labor unions were spawned by evil and continue to have a history of evil.

But don’t ask me about the particular evil of public unions; ask a former hero of the Democrat Party (which proves that Democrats are far more despicable today than they even were before), Franklin Delano Roosevelt:

This article by Rich Lowry and this piece in the Wall Street Journal both alluded to Franklin Roosevelt’s wariness towards public employee unions. I was surprised. So I dug around and found one source that supports this claim. In a letter to a public employee union, Roosevelt explains that, yes, they do have a right to organize, but there are some restrictions:

All Government employees should realize that the process of collective bargaining, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted into the public service. It has its distinct and insurmountable limitations when applied to public personnel management. The very nature and purposes of Government make it impossible for administrative officials to represent fully or to bind the employer in mutual discussions with Government employee organizations. The employer is the whole people, who speak by means of laws enacted by their representatives in Congress. Accordingly, administrative officials and employees alike are governed and guided, and in many instances restricted, by laws which establish policies, procedures, or rules in personnel matters.

Well, that hasn’t really come to pass now, has it?

Particularly, I want to emphasize my conviction that militant tactics have no place in the functions of any organization of Government employees. Upon employees in the Federal service rests the obligation to serve the whole people, whose interests and welfare require orderliness and continuity in the conduct of Government activities. This obligation is paramount. Since their own services have to do with the functioning of the Government, a strike of public employees manifests nothing less than an intent on their part to prevent or obstruct the operations of Government until their demands are satisfied. Such action, looking toward the paralysis of Government by those who have sworn to support it, is unthinkable and intolerable. It is, therefore, with a feeling of gratification that I have noted in the constitution of the National Federation of Federal Employees the provision that “under no circumstances shall this Federation engage in or support strikes against the United States Government.”

Interesting that he viewed strikes by Federal employees in such a way.

Not just “Federal employees.” “All government employees.” Public-sector unions in general.

Labor unions are un-American in every way, as are the Democrat-passed laws that make it impossible for private businesses to resist their impossible demands that are now breaking the back of our economy and our society; and public labor unions are even more so.

FDR’s argument was that public-sector labor unions would entail government workers literally organizing AGAINST AMERICA and AGAINST AMERICANS.

And in that one thing, FDR was entirely right.

Meanwhile, such flagrantly un-American organizations own the Democrat Party, and own President Barack Obama.

If you’re for public union workers literally allowing you to freeze to death as a means of forcing local governments to continue to impose the union agenda – which includes destroying American families to pad their pensions – then by all means, just keep voting for Obama and the Democrat Party.

But I hope you don’t mind if people who know the truth call you out for what you are: as un-American as Marxist pie (which taste just like a shit sandwich, for what it’s worth).